Against the Blog

Well, here it is. The last section of the book. What a long strange yeah okay. It actually starts with Dally talking into the ether but convinced that her dad is hearing her, which he is. So that's nice. She and Kit are married and move to Torino in 1915. That's nice. What's, uh, less nice is that she meets Clive Crouchmas again: She knew that Clive's demands would be as minimal as a girl could ask. Conjugal bliss? Flings with other men? no problem for Clive. There was  that awkward business of his having once tried to shop her into white slavery, but both understood that it was perhaps his one moment of genuine blind passion, everybody deserves at least one of those, doesn't he, and at the end of the day Clive was grateful for it and Dally was semi-sweetly amused.  (1067) I can't fucking EVEN with this. I'd go so far as to say that I literally  can't even. I mean, like, what the hell is this? Is she getting paid for this? Going with her old sugar daddy ...

We're with Lew in Los Angeles. He's a big-shot detective now. His time in England is apparently little more than a dream to him. He has three female assistants, Thetis, Shalimar, and Mezzanine (lol@those names), who are all action heroines: "crackerjack drivers, licensed gun owners, and surefooted as burros at the Grand Canyon" (1040). Is this some sort of Charlie's Angels  kind of thing? Maybe. He is approached by a Chester LeStreet--a black man, meaning the second definitely-black, named character in the novel; not super-impressive, I've gotta say--who has work for him: a few years ago there was this Syncopated Strangler case in a nightclub. There's a woman named Jardine Maraca, who was one of the victims' roommate. She had left town, but recently contacted the club to say that the supposed victim, Encarnación, is still alive and that someone's after her. So Lew is desired to look into the case. He gives Lew an address of a motel where she was su...

Book's really winding down at this point. This isn't the last we'll see of the Chums, but it's definitely pivotal. They have the idea that they should go UP. Up being equated with north, as you will remember from way the fuck back at the beginning of the novel. And there's "an updraft over the deserts of Northern Africa unprecedented in size and intensity" (1018). So...they should go there to go up, I guess? Why not? The Inconvenience  is growing, turning into more of a social thing; Miles has "hired a top-notch cooking staff, including a former sous-chef at the well-known Tour d'Argent in Paris." Also, they have Pugnax's--girlfriend?--introduced in this oddly florid passage: Sometimes he thought he'd been waiting for her all his life, that she had always been down there, moving somewhere just visible, among the landscapes rolling beneath the ship, deep among the details of tiny fenced or hedged fields, thatched or red-titled rooftops...

So we open with Scarsdale Vibe giving a speech to the Las Animas-Huerfano Delgation of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L.A.H.D.I.D.A.). Ha-ha. Not subtle, it is. Let me quote it at length: So of course we use them. We harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. We will buy it all up, all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where ...

So we're back in Mexico with Frank. And on reflection, I really think all this Mexican Revolution stuff is the hardest part of the book to grasp, at least for someone without a detailed understanding of the history. There are just SO many significant names, places, and events; it's not easy to figure out, and you wonder if there's necessarily any point  to doing so. What would you get out of it? Well, suffice it to say, Frank is involved. He finds himself in Jiménez, in the state of Chihuahua. Apparently, this place is famous for meteorites, which makes him think of Iceland spar. He finds "the strangest-looking damn rock he'd seen in a while," and "every time he touched the thing, even lightly, he began to hear a sort of voice. 'What are you doing here?' it seemed it was saying. There's no more about that. It just seemed like something I should mention. We can put it on the pile of sentient inanimate objects. Fighting against the government, h...

So in contrast, here we have a very short chapter. We're back in the US with Stray and Ewball: they're together now, but "by the time they agreed to part, [they] had forgotten why they ran off together in the first place" (977). Hey, it happens. But in the meantime, Ewball has the idea that she should meet his family, which she isn't wildly enthusiastic about. But she does. His mother is named Moline Velma Oust, but the real drama comes with his (unnamed) dad, who is a stamp collector who's pissed off at his son because of the fact that he's been writing home using rare error printings of stamps with upside down images: "inversion symbolized undoing. Here are three machines, false symbols of the capitalist faith, literally overthrown" (979). Oust père fails to appreciate the symbolism and they get into a physical fight which is broken up when the housekeeper fires off a pistol. The housekeeper is Mayva Traverse, who'd run into the Ousts on a ...

Should I have given such a significant chapter a jokey reference for a title? Perhaps not. But what's done is done, and we just have to learn to live with it. It's a very long chapter with a lot in it; I'm kind of dreading how long it's going to take me to write this entry. But write it I must! The end is in sight! Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian. That's who we're talking about. As we open the chapter, they've found "the Anarchist spa of Yz-les-Bains" in France somewhere. I kind of assumed that was a real place--I mean, not the "anarchist" spa part, but that there would be a real town called Yz-les-Bains--but no; it's purely an invention. Difficult to tell with Pynchon sometimes. Or all the time. It's one of those little mini-communities within larger, potentially hostile states that he loves so much. Something's happening here, but what it is ain't exactly clear: "...these solemn young folks carried with them an austerit...

Frank's still tangled up in the Mexican Revolution. He's been injured, having been shot and falling off a horse, so he's laid up but recovering in a church. El Espinero, the Indian shaman he'd met way back when, makes an appearance: is Frank dreaming? No, but he's actually there. Who ELSE is there? The other Estrella, Stray, Reef's former partner, somewhat deflatingly "on the arm of some impossibly good-looking Mexican dude" (920) named Rodrigo. She's apparently gotten much tougher, trading hostages with Madero and his people (one of whom this guy she's with is). They smoke a little and he goes back to sleep. This is nice: Frank drifted off and when he drifted back, everybody had left including El Espinero. Stray had put the cigarettes under the rolled-up shirt he was using for a pillow to keep them safe, which seemed such a tender thought he wished he'd been awake for it. (921). Aw. Pynchon can be, uh, not subtle about romance, but then, ...

So this continues from the last chapter. Ol' Clive has the idea that, as appealing as selling her to a harem might be, Dally "might more constructively serve as a bribe to somebody useful" (909). He sends some goons to kidnap her, but who should appear but ol' Kit, who was on a train going in the other direction, to Budapest (styled, probably more accurately, Buda-Pesth here). He gets rid of them by telling them that this is in fact "my wife Euphorbia, yes and we are planning to spend our honeymoon in Constantinople." So they escape, and we get this kind of neat bit: Years later, they would be unable to agree on how they found themselves on the Szécheny-Tér tramline, fleeing into the heart of the city. Kit knew that this was the sort of story grandfathers told to grandchildren, usually so that there could then be a grandmother's version, more practical and less inclined to grant slack...Which is to say that what Kit recalled was running a perilous evasiv...

Dally and Hunter in London, the situation in Venice having become a little too hot for comfort. Ruperta there, too, who is feeling jealous of Dally even though there's no romantic attachment between her and Hunter. To get rid of her, I guess, she introduces her to a man called Arturo Naunt, for whom she becomes a model posing for his "Angel of Death" statues in cemeteries. There's a very odd scene with Ruperta at a concert of Vaughan Williams music: As Phrygian resonances swept the great nave, doubled strings sang back and forth, and nine-part harmonies occupied the bones and blood vessels of those in attendance, very slowly Ruperta began to levitate, nothing vulgar, simply a tactful and stately ascent about halfway to the vaulting, where, tears running without interruption down her face, she floated in the autumnal light above the heads of the audience for the duration of the piece. After this, she is shaken: "You must never, never forgive me, Hunter....I can ne...

So we start with more of this political...stuff. We are informed that "Vlado had been [Cyprian's] one dependable operative, as much as possible in this game his friend" (866), and...wait, what? His friend? Did we ever even see them meet?  I've gotta say, Pynch, as big a fan as I am, all of this Great Game spycraft stuff seems decidedly half-baked. He meets with various people, including his ol' pal Ratty (married now) and the Prince and Princess Spongiatosta. Everyone's thinking about how best to take out Theign, and try as I might, I cannot even begin to understand Theign's arc or why everyone hates him now. Once again, I just don't think Pynchon does a good job with this. But, well, if you hate him as you're supposed to, we have...good?...news here, as he dies extremely unpleasantly. Is this torture porn? Rusted pulleys and driveshafts with broken leather belts drooping from them ran everywhere overhead. The floor was stained black from campfires...

Take that however you want. Whatevz. After having failed to murder Scarsdale Vibe, Reef is in Nice, up to his usual tricks, though "what he really needed was to go out and blow something up" (849). He meets his old anarchist pal Flaco, who had been in Mexico, but now is back. It seems he met Frank in the States. Do we see that? I don't think so, but it's easy to forget, with so dang much going on. Anyway, they're sitting and chatting and thinking, boy, it sure would be bad if a bomb went off in this here cafe, when wouldn't you know it? They survive, but are badly rattled, as one would expect. Reef has a dream, or vision, where Kit tells him it's all right, to which his psyche responds, "What the fuck are you talking about? I did everything wrong. I ran away from my baby son and the woman I loved" (852). Well, he'll get over it. Sort of. Flaco suggests that going after people like Vibe may be a waste of time. "But that don't mean Vib...

...and suddenly, bam, I'm in love again. Seriously, after a few that I sort of slogged through, I thought this chapter was just durned great. Picaresque, atmospheric, good character development--yeah! As you remember, Cyprian and Bevis are heading into the Balkans. They're traveling along the Croatian coastline by ship, where they meet a...girl? woman? named Jacintha Drulov. It's not clear to me quite how old she's supposed to be, but I'm going older because Bevis is putting the moves on her and I don't want it to be creepy. He explains--this is a fairly amusing riff--how he has a lot of experience in the field of "Advanced Idiotics," a field that exists because "one cannot overestimate the value of appearing to dwell in a state of idiocy." It was crazy. "Even the food  was idiotic" (823). He gets the ship's band to play a jaunty little number called "The Idiotic." Good times. They reach the town of Kotor in Montenegro...

This begins with the news that Austria is planning to annex Bosnia, which happened in October of 1908. Working in this foreign office, Cyprian learns about this. Theign wants him to go there to potentially pull people out. He plans to go with ol' Moistleigh. Meanwhile, Yashmeen is having problems of her own, the biggest one at the start being that her landlady has the idea that she's Jewish and that anti-Semitism is way cool, so she pretends not to recognize her and makes her leave. That's bad! She's just baffled, but Cyprian takes it seriously, as well one ought to. Everyone hates Theign now, for some reason. See, this is why I feel at sea. I don't know why, or what's happening or GOOD GOD. But anyway. We don't like Theign! Keep it in mind. We also learn about this Croatian guy, Vlado Clissan, who will be...relevant. Cyprian leaves on this mission, and Yashmeen to see him off, and "it was difficult to tell what Yashmeen was thinking as she offered her ...